Andrew Breslin's Reviews > Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

This AB review got the biggest laugh so far. (I am not through your whole list yet).
I thought the joke was very funny, but not because I exactly understood it.
I doubt I am qualified to read the book, although I fantasize that one day I could.
-JL

Thanks!

I recently corresponded with Professor Hofstadter, one of my favorite writers of all time. I ran the premise of my second novel by him, because it was inspired by his article on game theory that appeared in Metamagical Themas. He liked the idea but said my title needed to change. Though I liked my title, he won the Pulitzer Prize so . . . well, when a Pulitzer Prize winning writer tells you you need to change the title, that's something to think about.

This review is indeed in the spirit of the book itself. It got a laugh from me too, not at the simplistic binary joke that's really only funny the first time, but at the paradox suggested at the end.

Thanks! I really appreciate it.

paradox? that is definitely not a paradox

Thanks for stopping by, Egil. You will get no argument from me that my comment at the end is not really a genuine paradox. What it is, of course, is a joke. That's what I do these days: I review other people's books and try to make my reviews at least mildly entertaining with a few jokes. I used to write my own works of fiction and non-fiction, but now I just mostly write book reviews. Whether that is itself funny or just sad is a matter of personal perspective.

The humor derives from the fact that the admittedly non-paradoxical statement resembles a paradox. It's not one itself, but it is designed to call to the mind Epimenides' paradoxical statement that all Cretans are liars. (He hailed from the lying land of Crete himself, of course). Epimenides' paradox is famously rephrased as simply "this statement is a lie," which is truly and genuinely paradoxical, but not necessarily funny.

As for funny: I am reminded of more than one gem attributed to Yogi Berra, who gets credit for a lot of things he never actually said, because he said so many funny things, often involving amusing contradictions.

"Hey Yogi, let's go to that Italian restaurant you like so much."

"Nah, I don't want to go there anymore. Nobody ever goes there anymore. It's too crowded."

Another funny statement is attributed to someone named Jim Fiebig. I have no idea who that is, but apparently Mr. Fiebig had little patience for the cacophonous excreta of neophyte violists practicing next door and said:

"No one should be allowed to play the violin until he has mastered it."

Which, personally, I find hilarious. But I'm a banjo player. I think most people would prefer that we banjoists not play our instruments whether we have mastered them or not.

Not only is the statement at the end of my review not a genuine paradox, it's not even a true statement. Clearly there are plenty of people who have not read GEB yet who would immensely enjoy it. So I will restate my statement with as much rigid formalism as I can muster on one weak cup of coffee, and with all humor surgically removed for the benefit of those with allergies thereto:

Call the set of all people set P
Call the set of all people who have read GEB set R
Call the set of all people who would like GEB set L
Both R and L are subsets of set P. The majority of elements in set L are also elements of Set R.

(The justification for the last statement is that it was an enormously popular and successful book published decades ago. Most people who are remotely interested in the subject matter have heard about this fabulous book long before my pathetic little review came along, and they went out and read it with no prompting from me. I have no illusions that anyone who has not read it yet is going to jump up and go out and buy it. I expect that anyone who happened upon the review and read it did so because they already read the book and it meant something to them.)

If you are a member of set L the probability is very high that you are also a member of Set R. If you are not a member of Set R, there is a low (but non-zero!) probability that you will be a member of set L.

There are, of course still elements of L who are not (yet) elements of R and I encourage those people to join set R right away. The local library can make this happen for these rogue elements. There is close to 100% probability that GEB is available. Just tell the librarian "I want to join the R set!" and she'll help you out, I bet. You may have to be more specific.

So that's a more accurate restatement of my observation at the end regarding the people who have read Godel Escher Bach and the people who would like it. I think the first one is funnier though.

I once wrote a story called "The Agelast" about a mathematician who studies humor in great detail. He uses models from catastrophe theory to analyze the discontinuous cognitive shift that characterizes a humorous revelation (This is not a remotely original idea, of course, but the story was an original story.) After years of exhaustive study, the protagonist understands humor on a deeper level than anyone in history. And he doesn't find anything funny anymore. His sense of humor is completely destroyed. Whether the story itself is funny or sad is, again, a matter of personal perspective.

Thanks for your input and have a great day.

Hello Andrew,

I appreciate all the time you took to clarify this. However, as you implied, personal perspectives may very strongly from individuals. Would you believe that I find Epimenides' paradox funny just as it is? Not hilrarious, but it certainly brings a smile on my face. So simple and yet... a beautiful paradox.

I think it's a bit hard to know beforehand your intentions without all this background context you now present. As a matter of personal perspective, obviously, I think your comment would have been just fine had it ended with that "Hmmmm". Funny enough to me, anyway.. calling it a paradox actually ruined the joke for me, but well, I guess it's impossible to please all readers and surely you know better about writing.

The Agelast sounds as a very nice read, by the way. Humour and laughter are very complex topics, and the end of your story reminds me of the connection between laughter and tickling: you cannot induce laughter by tickling yourself or as R. Tallis puts it: "since the brain's job is to deal with the unexpected, the entirely expected sensations associated with self-tickling are scarcely registered." So I'm guessing that your poor mathematician stopped experiencing this element of surprise/discontinuity.

Thanks for your additional commentary. I'm intrigued by the tickling example. I never actually finished that story to my satisfaction. I may have to appropriate the quotation you supply to work that into the story and give it some more meat. Right now it's rather a skeletal tale. That might be just the thing to fatten it up a bit. At the very least it could provide an excuse to segue to a tickling scene, with all the attendant literary possibilities that entails.

Thanks again for your interesting commentary,

-andy

Your review is both apt and hilarious, very well put sir!

Tara wrote: "Your review is both apt and hilarious, very well put sir!"

Thanks so much! That makes my day. :)

okay this ""No one should be allowed to play the violin until he has mastered it."" one really did it for me. that one will stay for me for a while.

anyway, i very much suck at math, could not keep up with the ideal pace of studying physics etc- but i like everything in life i guess? but i also see myself as firmly in the "not good at math but definitely super special bc unlike others i don't COMPLETELY hate it, where's my cookie?"

and also i feel like this would be almost unbearable to read alone bc there is probably an infinite amount of stuff to discuss. literally infinite.

and that story sounds interesting and i really am an obnoxious pretentious asshole when i feel like someone is just pursuing something creative to perform some sort of identity they want other people to see. which becomes apparent within a couple of sentences ususally; so the fact that it's kind of a highly technical concept isn't some sort of "gimmick", if you know what i mean.

like those people who want to get an infinity sign tattooed bc it's so deep and talk about the reptilian new world order agenda but would NEVER actually want to delve into the science even a tiny little bit

Ha ha. re: infinity tattoos: I have Leonhard Euler's identity equation tattooed on me, as well as a magic square. Also a bunch of spiders, because they are natural mathematicians. But I was thinking of getting some infinity symbols tattooed next. But not the familiar lemniscate, or rather not exclusively. I wanted to get various mathematical representations of ordinal and cardinal infinity, so aleph null, aleph 1, c, ω,Ω, etc.

Here's some more about infinity: http://andyrantsandraves.blogspot.tw/...

Anyhow, GEB is an amazing book, but not hating math is probably not sufficient for you to enjoy it. You really need to love math, or you will hate this book. To paraphrase my own semi-paradoxical statement above: just about anyone who would like this book has already read it. If you would be likely to like it, you would have read it by now, so the fact that you haven't yet read it is solid evidence that you wouldn't like it. QED.

Thanks for your commentary and have a great day!

Andrew wrote: "Ha ha. re: infinity tattoos: I have Leonhard Euler's identity equation tattooed on me, as well as a magic square. Also a bunch of spiders, because they are natural mathematicians. But I was thinkin..."

Euler is from my hometown. and I love that I'm 27 now.
I would definitely get an infinity tattoo but those people have ruined it for me...I'm insecure enough to not want to be associated with them.

Anyway I've started it but in terms of general concepts I don't find it, like, un-ununderstandable if you actually read it?? It's not hard to look something up if you're missing part of the equation, so to speak. Pun not intended, but appreciated. But I did always have trouble accepting certain parts of mathematics where I feel like people have taken the easy route to solve a problem when the more fundamental answer would have hid behind the more difficult process. This sounds a little abstract but maybe you know what I mean. Will definitely report back when I reach the "fuck this" point. Until then I hope you don't mind me asking some more questions bc it's difficult to find people who are int erested in math- can you tell me about the concepts/topics that stick out to you in some way? Things you find particularly illuminating or bother you? other than e. f ex imaginary numbers? But anything you can think of and feel like answering

Anyway, I tend to not finish any books, no matter how interesting. I did however somehow (????) get through the Feynman lectures. It will probably all depend on whether I can

>>Until then I hope you don't mind me asking some more questions bc it's difficult to find people who are interested in math

Sure! I love math and I love discussing math.


>>> can you tell me about the concepts/topics that stick out to you in some way?

The biggest thing is the paradigm-smashing impact of Godel's 1931 incompleteness theorem. The idea that there are questions that can be asked within the context of a formal logical system that cannot be decided as true or false within that system.

I have personally been a little obsessed with the Goldbach conjecture for decades now, since before I knew about Godel or GEB. It seems so obvious that the conjecture is true but it has proven apparently impossible to prove. And what Godel's theorem, as illustrated by GEB, has shown, is that it may in fact be 100% true and 100% unprovable, that there will ALWAYS be statements about any logical system that are true but cannot be provable as true, within that system, and that the Goldbach conjecture may indeed be one of these statements. .

Of course some mathematician thought the same might have been true of Fermat's last theorem, that it was true but unprovable, and then that Wiles fellow went and proved it. But I suspect that the Goldbach conjecture might be genuinely unprovable. But what Godel's theorem has taught us is that if the Goldback conjecture is in fact true but unprovable, we'll never be able to actually prove that.

Shameless self promotion: here's a story about Fermat's Last Theorem:

http://atbreslin.com/stories/grapes.pdf

:)

thanks for this, i love it.

Jass. wrote: "thanks for this, i love it."

Thanks!!

yup- it's the kind of book one requires as discipline.